business & technology he says. “I used argon, nitrogen, helium, mixtures...” He also tried many different types of needles, testing different shapes, sizes and gauges. After that came experimentation with different types of wine. What if Pinot Noir was more subject to oxidation than other varieties, he asked himself. Could a single needle work for all different types of wines? “I tried wines from all over the world, from vintages going back to 1961, to make sure my system didn’t have an impact on a single wine that I wouldn’t be aware of,” he said. Lambrecht says he would buy a half case of wine at a time to test. First he would pierce one bottle. Then one month later, he’d open a control bottle and compare the wines. “My sons would scramble the bottles and I’d try to say if I could tell which one was which.” At six months he’d try again with another bottle. Then a year later he’d test again with a new control. After five years, he had six bottles of wine being tested against one another. Soon he was making devices for his friends. “I started the company in 2011 and raised a small amount of money, and then in 2012 raised more money and hired a wonderful CEO, Nick Lazaris” says Lambrecht. “After the first six years of testing it at home with my wife and younger son, I brought it out to Masters of Wine, Master Sommeliers and winemakers,” he said. “I’d take their own wines and have them taste it.” Soon, he had Robert Parker trying the system. Then the staff at Wine Spectator. Then Jancis Robinson, who wrote “I cannot fault Coravin technically and I can easily see its applications for restaurateurs who would like to offer particularly fine wines by the glass.” Eric Asimov, writing in the New York Times, discovered the device was allowing at least one New York restaurant to offer rare wines by the glass. “Since midAugust, when he began using the Coravin
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focus solely on the US market for the first year, to ensure restaurants knew how to use it, they were discovered that around 35 per cent of people coming to the Coravin website were from Europe, China and Hong Kong. “It’s about three times as fast as I thought. The overseas interest has really shocked me,” says Lambrecht. “We realised the international interest was really strong, so we’re working to bring it to Europe.” But isn’t designing a wine gadget a bit trivial compared to nuclear energy and spinal implants? Lambrecht vigorously denies that. “If you interact with something that people are passionate about, you can affect their lives,” he said. “Wine is as big a passion as somebody’s health. It’s amazing how much people love and appreciate their wine.” He says he also loves healthcare, because of the ability to impact people’s lives, and he will never leave the medical field. “I still have my spinal implant company, which I love. I will make sure I have one consumer product and one medical product going for the rest of my life.” He may make more than wine lovers and restaurateurs happy – his system must be music to the ears of cork producers. The Coravin doesn’t work on screwcaps or synthetic corks. “I think of the cork as the best-tested preservation of all time,” he says. “There is no sealing system that has been tested for 250 years with anything near the degree of the success of cork. The Coravin is leaving the cork in place to do its job.” At the price of super-premium wine today, any way to make a bottle last longer or go further seems set to do well. Unless, of course, there’s a genius out there working on a way to make the bottle itself redundant.
All the publicity has meant the Coravin, which was only launched commercially in July, has had an unexpected response. Although Lambrecht’s company decided to
Contact: www.coravin.com. This story first appeared in Meininger’s Wine Business International.
The needle: Coravin’s 1000 is a handheld gadget retailing at $299, which basically means the wine lover never opens the bottle at all.
at the NoMad, Mr Pastuszak has built a list that now includes about 30 wines that you might never expect to see sold by the glass,” he wrote. “Want to try a 1996 Château-Grillet, a rare and unusual white wine from the northern Rhône made in minute quantities? A bottle will cost you $525, but you could have a glass for a mere $110.” He notes while the price may seem astronomical, what you get is about a quarter of a bottle.
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March 2014 – Issue 602